The demand for sexual violence in fiction is easy to explain. It allows us to fantasize about behavior that would be prohibitively disadvantageous in practice, and it allows us to reflect on hypothetical situations that are relevant to our interests, such as how to deal with violent people.
My default model for abusive relationships *where the right to exit is not blocked* is indeed revealed preference. Not necessarily revealed preference for the abuse, but for the total package of goods and bads in the relationship.
The sex and romance market is a market after all, and different individuals have different market power. This is why some people pay for sex, and I’m sure some people accept abuse they would not tolerate from a partner with less market power.
Of course, this isn’t true if someone breaks a promise unexpectedly, like ignoring an agreed-upon safe word. That’s massive enemy action. But if it happens repeatedly, and the relationship is maintained for longer periods of time, even though the right to exit is not blocked and both partners could break it off, my default interpretation is still reveled preference for the total package.
I didn’t read the whole post, but most of that is just the right to exit being blocked by various mechanisms, including socioeconomic pressure and violence. And the socioeconomic ones aren’t even necessarily incompatible with revealed preference; if the alternative is homelessness, this may suck, but the partner still has no obligation to continue the relationship and the socioeconomic advantages are obviously a part of the package.
If you have such a large definition of the right to exit being blocked, then there is practically no such thing as the right to exit not being blocked, and the claim in your original comment is useless.
What? Why? No sane person would classify “he will murder me if I leave” as “the right to exit isn’t blocked”. I don’t expect much steelmanning from the downvote-bots here, but if you’re strawmanning on a rationalist board, good-faith communication becomes disincentivized. It’s not like I have skin in the game; all my relationships are nonviolent and I neither give a shit about feminism nor anti-feminism.
Still, if “she’s such a nice person but sometimes she explodes” isn’t compatible with revealed preference for the overall relationship, I don’t know what is. My argument was never an argument that such relationships are great or that you should absolutely never use your right to exit. It’s just a default interpretation of many relationships that are being maintained even though they contain abuse. Obviously if you’re ankle-chained to a wall without a phone, that doesn’t qualify as revealed preference. And while I don’t object to ways government can buffer against the suffering of homelessness or socioeconomic hardship, it’s still a logical necessity that the socioeconomic advantages of a relationship are a part of that relationship’s attractiveness, just like good pay is a reason for people to stay in shitty jobs and it doesn’t violate the concept of revealed preference, it doesn’t make those jobs nonconsensual and it wouldn’t necessarily make people better off if those jobs didn’t exist.
And by the way, it’s right to exit, not right to exist. There’s a big difference.
You need to define the terms you use in a way so that what you are saying is useful by having pragmatic consequences on the real world of actual things, and not simply on the same level as arguing by definition.
My read of this thread is that your (Andaro’s) original comment pointed at a particular subset of relationships, which are ‘bad’ but seem better than the alternatives to the person inside them, where the reason to trust the judgment of the person inside them is that right to exit means they will leave relationships that are better than their alternatives. Paperclip Maximizer then pointed out that a major class of reasons people stay in abusive relationships is that their alternatives are manipulated by the abuser, either through explicit or implicit threats or attacks directed at the epistemology (such that the alternatives are difficult to imagine or correctly weigh).
I understood Paperclip Maximizer’s point to be that there’s a disconnect between the sort of relationships you describe in the ancestral comment and what a ‘typical’ abusive relationship might look like; it might be highly difficult to determine whether “right to exit” is being denied or not. (For example, in #12, the primary factor preventing exit is the pride of the person stuck in the relationship. Is that their partner blocking exercising the right?) If this disconnect exists as a tradeoff, such that the more a relationship involves reducing right to exit the more we suspect that relationship is (or could be) abusive, then the original comment doesn’t seem germane; interpreted such that it’s true, it’s irrelevant, and interpreted such that it’s relevant, it’s untrue.
Vaniver, your post is eloquent and relevant, yet of course no one gives a shit about that after being downvoted for engaging in a controversial topic in the first place. At that point, all I see is undifferentiated hostility and I’m not going to engage in the cognitive effort to change that view.
It’s not even really your fault. I engaged in a conversation of a controversial, moralistic nature without having any strategic selfish reason to do so. That’s a bad habit if there ever was one. Alas, humans are not always strategic, and sometimes I need the reminder what really matters and what doesn’t.
From that perspective, domestic abuse is irrelevant. The average abuse victim has never done anything for me to deserve my positive reciprocity. I’m not an abuse victim and if I were, I’d simply take personal revenge. Unless of course the abuser is so valuable to my life that I see them as a net-benefit despite the occasional abuse. Hard but not impossible, which was of course my whole point.
Less Wrong and its community has done little for me. You’re not as terrible as EA, and I’ve gained the occasional useful insight here, but you’re still toxic on net, so I’d classify you as minor enemies. Marginally worth harming but no where near the top of my list.
So to sum up, fuck it and good riddance. I actually kind of thank you for the downvotes in this case, this type of negative interaction helps me refocus my perspective and priorities. In fact, I’m now slightly less caring about consent and abuse than I was before this conversation, and that’s probably quite rational for my personal values.
The demand for sexual violence in fiction is easy to explain. It allows us to fantasize about behavior that would be prohibitively disadvantageous in practice, and it allows us to reflect on hypothetical situations that are relevant to our interests, such as how to deal with violent people.
My default model for abusive relationships *where the right to exit is not blocked* is indeed revealed preference. Not necessarily revealed preference for the abuse, but for the total package of goods and bads in the relationship.
The sex and romance market is a market after all, and different individuals have different market power. This is why some people pay for sex, and I’m sure some people accept abuse they would not tolerate from a partner with less market power.
Of course, this isn’t true if someone breaks a promise unexpectedly, like ignoring an agreed-upon safe word. That’s massive enemy action. But if it happens repeatedly, and the relationship is maintained for longer periods of time, even though the right to exit is not blocked and both partners could break it off, my default interpretation is still reveled preference for the total package.
I can only link to another Pervocracy post.
I didn’t read the whole post, but most of that is just the right to exit being blocked by various mechanisms, including socioeconomic pressure and violence. And the socioeconomic ones aren’t even necessarily incompatible with revealed preference; if the alternative is homelessness, this may suck, but the partner still has no obligation to continue the relationship and the socioeconomic advantages are obviously a part of the package.
If you have such a large definition of the right to exit being blocked, then there is practically no such thing as the right to exit not being blocked, and the claim in your original comment is useless.
What? Why? No sane person would classify “he will murder me if I leave” as “the right to exit isn’t blocked”. I don’t expect much steelmanning from the downvote-bots here, but if you’re strawmanning on a rationalist board, good-faith communication becomes disincentivized. It’s not like I have skin in the game; all my relationships are nonviolent and I neither give a shit about feminism nor anti-feminism.
Still, if “she’s such a nice person but sometimes she explodes” isn’t compatible with revealed preference for the overall relationship, I don’t know what is. My argument was never an argument that such relationships are great or that you should absolutely never use your right to exit. It’s just a default interpretation of many relationships that are being maintained even though they contain abuse. Obviously if you’re ankle-chained to a wall without a phone, that doesn’t qualify as revealed preference. And while I don’t object to ways government can buffer against the suffering of homelessness or socioeconomic hardship, it’s still a logical necessity that the socioeconomic advantages of a relationship are a part of that relationship’s attractiveness, just like good pay is a reason for people to stay in shitty jobs and it doesn’t violate the concept of revealed preference, it doesn’t make those jobs nonconsensual and it wouldn’t necessarily make people better off if those jobs didn’t exist.
And by the way, it’s right to exit, not right to exist. There’s a big difference.
You need to define the terms you use in a way so that what you are saying is useful by having pragmatic consequences on the real world of actual things, and not simply on the same level as arguing by definition.
I observe that you are communicating in bad faith and with hostility, so I will use my right to exit for any further communication with you.
My read of this thread is that your (Andaro’s) original comment pointed at a particular subset of relationships, which are ‘bad’ but seem better than the alternatives to the person inside them, where the reason to trust the judgment of the person inside them is that right to exit means they will leave relationships that are better than their alternatives. Paperclip Maximizer then pointed out that a major class of reasons people stay in abusive relationships is that their alternatives are manipulated by the abuser, either through explicit or implicit threats or attacks directed at the epistemology (such that the alternatives are difficult to imagine or correctly weigh).
I understood Paperclip Maximizer’s point to be that there’s a disconnect between the sort of relationships you describe in the ancestral comment and what a ‘typical’ abusive relationship might look like; it might be highly difficult to determine whether “right to exit” is being denied or not. (For example, in #12, the primary factor preventing exit is the pride of the person stuck in the relationship. Is that their partner blocking exercising the right?) If this disconnect exists as a tradeoff, such that the more a relationship involves reducing right to exit the more we suspect that relationship is (or could be) abusive, then the original comment doesn’t seem germane; interpreted such that it’s true, it’s irrelevant, and interpreted such that it’s relevant, it’s untrue.
Vaniver, your post is eloquent and relevant, yet of course no one gives a shit about that after being downvoted for engaging in a controversial topic in the first place. At that point, all I see is undifferentiated hostility and I’m not going to engage in the cognitive effort to change that view.
It’s not even really your fault. I engaged in a conversation of a controversial, moralistic nature without having any strategic selfish reason to do so. That’s a bad habit if there ever was one. Alas, humans are not always strategic, and sometimes I need the reminder what really matters and what doesn’t.
From that perspective, domestic abuse is irrelevant. The average abuse victim has never done anything for me to deserve my positive reciprocity. I’m not an abuse victim and if I were, I’d simply take personal revenge. Unless of course the abuser is so valuable to my life that I see them as a net-benefit despite the occasional abuse. Hard but not impossible, which was of course my whole point.
Less Wrong and its community has done little for me. You’re not as terrible as EA, and I’ve gained the occasional useful insight here, but you’re still toxic on net, so I’d classify you as minor enemies. Marginally worth harming but no where near the top of my list.
So to sum up, fuck it and good riddance. I actually kind of thank you for the downvotes in this case, this type of negative interaction helps me refocus my perspective and priorities. In fact, I’m now slightly less caring about consent and abuse than I was before this conversation, and that’s probably quite rational for my personal values.